Xero Transforms Their Security Culture With CloudGuard IaaS

by Moti Sagey, March 25th 2019

As businesses continue to move their workflow into the cloud, the need for multi-layered protection is critical. The dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure introduces a variety of new challenges, so implementing advanced protection beyond the traditional security approach will help your organization ward off the next storm.

Xero, a global online platform for small businesses and their advisors, identified key challenges within their cloud infrastructure. The company was spending an immense amount of time and resources controlling the environment rather than fully supporting product innovation. Xero were looking for a solution that extend their security management-as-a-service feature to the DevOps teams without slowing down product development.

“Security was the first thing we thought about,” said Aaron McKeown, Head of Security Engineering and Architecture, Xero. “We had to think about data encryption, inbound and outbound traffic connectivity, and protection against web-based attacks like DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks.”

The Xero team worked with Check Point to integrate CloudGuard IaaS into their architecture. Check Point CloudGuard IaaS delivers automated, multi-layered, elastic security that scales with the dynamic AWS environment. This enabled traffic to be directed to a defined “security zone” for security scrubbing based on any number of attributes—regulatory requirements, policy, type of traffic, and others.

“Check Point and AWS have released Xero from the constraints of traditional management and security practices,” said McKeown. “Together we enable a strong, positive security culture across the business without limiting growth in any way.”

Thanks to the automated security solution, Xero was able to transform the company’s security culture across security engineering, DevOps, and partnerships. Xero moved 700,000 customers, 59 billion records, $1 trillion worth of transactions to a secure, fully managed AWS environment in nine months. For more information about how Xero integrated CloudGuard into their security infrastructure, read about their customer case study here.